Winning Tips & Strategies of Self-Made Millionaire Entrepreneursby Millionaire MBA SMASHWORDS pot

37 Winning Tips & Strategies of Self-Made Millionaire
Entrepreneurs
by
Millionaire MBA
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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Copyright © Millionaire MBA 2010
First Published 2010 by ELW Publishing Bath, UK
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Contents
Introduction
Tip #1 – If you’re not determined to see success through to the end – don’t even begin
Tip #2 – If you don’t believe in your product or service – don’t even begin
Tip #3 – When negotiating with others - always put yourself in their shoes
Tip #4 – You don’t necessarily have to have the best idea to succeed
Tip #5 – Look after your cash (Part 1)
Tip #6 – Look after your cash (Part 2)
Tip #7 – Great entrepreneurs are not always great managers – recognise that and get the right
people in to manage your business
Tip #8 – Failure is inevitable as an entrepreneur. Make sure you learn from it and turn it into
a positive
Tip #9 – Business is cyclical. Work the highs and the lows for maximum return
Tip #10 – Business is about repeatable systems. What repeatable systems can you create in
your business?
Tip #11 – You can never say for certain that your business will be successful. You can only
say that YOU will make it successful

Tip #12 – You can’t market research a market that doesn’t exist
Tip #13 – Risk is essential - but it must be calculated. Ultimately, only YOU can make a
decision
Tip #14 – You must manage the downside of risk
Tip # 15 – To be successful you must first feel uncomfortable
Tip #16 – Get used to hearing the word NO!
Tip #17 – Language is power. Develop your language (Part 1)
Tip #18 – Language sells. Develop your language (Part 2)
Tip #19 – Become a master communicator
Tip #20 – Build a balanced team (Part 1)
Tip #21 – Build a balanced team (Part 2)
Tip #22 – Keep focused exclusively on your goal. Do not get distracted
Tip #23 – Set Goals and have a definite target
Tip #24 – Make a decision to eliminate stress (Part 1)
Tip #25 – Make a decision to eliminate stress (Part 2)
Tip #26 – Get in the groove
Tip #27 – Be precious with your time
Tip #28 – Don’t procrastinate – Take action
Tip #29 – Get out and network with key people
Tip #30 – Learn to listen and learn to ask the right questions
Tip #31 – The more you do and see – the more connections your create – AND the more
ideas you generate
Tip #32 – Enjoy success when it comes – you have earned it
Tip #33 – Develop your brand
Tip #34 – Leverage leverage
Tip #35 – Get the fundamentals right
Tip #36 - Know how you are going to make your million
Tip #37 – You can’t afford to choose the wrong opportunity
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Introduction
A few years back, 50 leading UK entrepreneurs and business owners were interviewed in
their homes, offices and hotels. The purpose of the interviews was to find out exactly what
made them successful, and how other aspiring entrepreneurs could replicate their business
success.
Those digitally recorded audio interviews were turned into a 'timeless' business mentoring
programme called Millionaire MBA. Millionaire MBA is regarded as one of the best
programmes in the world to teach entrepreneurial thinking and the 'millionaire mindset'.
Millionaire MBA is a rich, deep mentoring programme which entrepreneurs listen to over 40
days. Literally tens of thousands of entrepreneurs (like you) around the world have benefited
from this programme.
In this short book, you’ll find 37 winning tips and strategies taken from Millionaire MBA
which you can apply in your business today.
To find out more about the full business mentoring programme please visit
http :// www . millionairemba . com /
Tip #1 – If you’re not determined to see success
through to the end – don’t even begin
Mandy Haberman
Without bloody-minded determination and persistence you don’t achieve success. So you
have to have that, if you’re going to be successful.
There are so many barriers to success – and I don’t know if it’s just something of this
country, but there are so many.
You know, the banks don’t want to lend you money; you take ideas to companies – they
don’t want to licence it because basically they want to see if it’s got legs and then they’ll
pinch it anyway.
There are so many things where you just have to keep on banging your head against that
brick wall until eventually the brick wall comes down.
And if you haven’t got that determination, you’re not going to get there because it never
comes on a plate.
Tip #2 – If you don’t believe in your product or

service – don’t even begin
Karan Bilimoria
What you’ve got to have, and what I had, is complete and utter faith in your idea, and that
faith comes across as confidence, and that confidence generates trust from other people and
belief from other people because you believe in your idea.
Tip #3 – When negotiating with others - always put
yourself in their shoes
Sir Christopher Evans
It’s part of your streetwiseness, I think, whether you’re raising funds, investing in funds,
doing deals, buying or selling a company or piece of technology, or working with a scientist
or whatever.
You’re forever negotiating something. It’s a two-way thing, and you have to be crystal-clear
about what this other person wants.
What I always do is transport myself into the other guy’s chair.
I always think, “What does he want? He’s going to meet me in a minute. Is he in awe of me,
does he respect me, does he hate me, does he dislike me, am I everything that’s good or bad
in this area as far as he’s concerned?”
I need to try to figure that out and put myself into his mind. Sometimes I know the person, so
I know their personality; I know what they will think about the situation.
Sometimes I don’t know them at all, and, for all those reasons, you can then eventually sit in
the chair as if you were them, thinking, “What would I want Chris Evans to be saying?”
And that’s how I try to plan it.
Tip #4 – You don’t necessarily have to have the
best idea to succeed
Duncan Bannatyne
A lot of people think and a lot of people say, “You’ve got to have a great idea to start in
business.” I think that’s rubbish.
The nursing homes wasn’t a great idea. Loads of people were doing it, and, as you said
yourself, some people built one and operated one and stayed in that one.
A lot of people built one children’s day nursery or opened one and stayed in that one; that

wasn’t a great idea.
The same with the health clubs: There’s loads of people who had one gym, one health club,
and everybody knew the health club business was expanding.
These three businesses were businesses where it wasn’t a unique idea – it wasn’t my unique
idea. There was nothing unique about my health club.
There isn’t a unique selling point. A lot of people start talking about that now; they say,
“What’s your unique selling point to make your business successful?”
Bank managers ask you that, and I say, “Well, there isn’t one. We just work a little bit harder,
we try a little bit harder, and we just give the public a little bit more value for money, and
that’s it.”
Tip #5 – Look after your cash (Part 1)
Lord Harris
You’ve always got to rely on money back for a rainy day, and we do. If something went
wrong… Like, we talked about our goal to open 50 stores.
Just imagine trade because of a war or something fell off a cliff tomorrow or interest rates
went to 15 percent – I’m just using this as an example – and people didn’t buy as much
carpet.
The first thing you do is rein back from your expansion programme and get your cash in
order. I’ve never known anyone who’s gone broke who’s got cash.
Tip #6 – Look after your cash (Part 2)
Michael Smith
I could recite the mantra or the word that was drummed into me in the early days by everyone
when they did hear we’re setting up a business – was just, “Cash flow is king and always
make sure you’ve got cash in the business.”
It doesn’t matter whether you’re making profits or what the future orders are – the business
doesn’t exist unless it has the cash. That’s what it breathes on.
Tip #7 – Great entrepreneurs are not always great
managers – recognise that and get the right
people in to manage your business
Angus Clacher

I think a lot of entrepreneurs micro-manage, tell people what they want them to do and then
stand over them and show them how they want them to do it.
Being an entrepreneur is very different from being a manager, and an entrepreneur needs to
put on a different hat and learn how to manage properly.
Entrepreneurs, because of their backgrounds in arrogance and self-belief and passion and all
of these things, aren’t necessarily good managers of people.
I personally put my hands up to that many, many times and to this day struggle to do better at
managing people.
Tip #8 – Failure is inevitable as an entrepreneur.
Make sure you learn from it and turn it into a
positive
Mark Marsland
You have to be able to take something positive from a failure. So, is there such a thing as the
word “failure”? Failure sounds such a big drop, doesn’t it?
Not a failure – a setback, that’s all that it is. A failure is just a setback when things don’t work
out the way you’re expecting them to.
What you must do when you hit a setback is take something from it. Something good always
comes from a setback.
It’s not until you’re a little bit further down the road, looking back, that you can say, “God,
yes, if that didn’t happen, this wouldn’t have happened; and if this wouldn’t have happened, I
wouldn’t have found out about this; and that wouldn’t have led to that.”
You’ve got to remember that sometimes the jigsaw piece doesn’t fit, but if you keep
searching, you’ll find the piece that does. All that a setback is – all that a failure is – is the
inability to find the right piece of the jigsaw.
All you’ve got to do is keep looking forward, find the right piece, slot it into place and get
building that jigsaw again.
There is a theory that I do subscribe to – and I always say it to myself whenever I hit points
of adversity – and that is that you can’t move forward looking back. And you really can’t.
Tip #9 – Business is cyclical. Work the highs and
the lows for maximum return

Luke Johnson
As far as I’m concerned, you do need to have setbacks because they teach you to be humble.
You probably learn more from the difficult times than the easy times.
You realise that most things go in cycles – that recessions follow booms, that nothing grows
from the sky and that it’s important to keep things in perspective.
It’s extremely rare to come across businesses, particularly in a relatively small economy like
ours, that consistently grow, year in, year out, and never put a foot wrong.
It is in the nature of things that if something can go wrong, it probably will.
Tip #10 – Business is about repeatable systems.
What repeatable systems can you create in your
business?
Duncan Bannatyne
Repeatable systems are very, very important. In the nursing home business it was fairly easy
because you get the guidelines.
The first thing you do is you get the guidelines on how to run and what staffing requirements
you need in a nursing home.
You read the guidelines, and it says in the guidelines that you require one qualified nurse for
every 20 residents during the day and one for every 25 at night time.
So you would build in multiples of 20, 25. Nobody is going to build a 51-bedroom nursing
home because that means you need three nurses at night time, so you build 50 bedrooms.
We went and looked at the opposition before we started building the first one, and people
were living six in a bedroom.
And we knew the income, so we thought, “Well, we can actually build single bedrooms with
en suite toilets with the same income and make a fantastic profit if we build them in the
systematic way of 20, 40, 50 bedrooms.
And that’s what we’ve done.
The children’s nurseries are the same; you get the guidelines, exactly the same.
You need one member staff for every three children under the age of 2, and you have one
member of staff for every four children between 2 and 3, and one for every eight children
between 3 and 5.

And then each child must have x amount of floor space. So, people doing conversions end up
with a room that’s big enough for 13 children or 15 children.
So, we built ours in multiples of 16, 12, whatever the staffing levels were. And again, it was
efficient use of staff.
The health clubs are slightly different because nobody tells you what the guidelines are for
staffing.
But you could work out that most people would join a health club within five or ten minutes’
drive, and so there is only a certain number of people you can get from that.
Between 3,000 and 5,000 members is about the most you can get into a health club because
of that drive. So you build it big enough to hold that number of people and that’s it.
You just offer them a better service, keep the prices down, have value for money and you’ve
filled it.
Tip #11 – You can never say for certain that your
business will be successful. You can only say
that YOU will make it successful
Julie Meyer
The answer is you don’t, and that comes back to the optimism, the confidence and the
persistence. You absolutely don’t know that it’s going to be successful.
And there were moments, about this time, October of 1999, after we had launched in 17 cities
– well, actually, even earlier than that.
I would say over the summer of ’99 when I was planning for that international launch.
So taking what was essentially still a cocktail party and thinking, “I’m going to build this
international network!” – and I was working all alone. There was nobody else.
I didn’t even have a personal assistant, and for whatever reason, I didn’t even have a laptop at
home. I kept on going to the Internet café.
And in my living room I just had these stacks of paper –Copenhagen, Stockholm, Munich –
and it was just not what you would think because I’m pretty high tech, but that summer it was
just helter-skelter.
I remember thinking a couple of times, “Where’s this all going to? What’s going to happen
here?”

There was just something that kind of compelled me to go forward, and sure enough we
launched in 17 cities.
On September 7, 1999, we were on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and from there
on the network effects just kicked in like I couldn’t have imagined it.
Right time, the hard work paid off, and it was that fall of ’99 for about another six, seven
months that – if I’d waited probably even three, four months, it wouldn’t have had the same
impact as launching first thing, right after the summer, 17 cities, and just allowing the
network effects to take off.
So, the answer is that you don’t [know it will be successful], but I guess the more you do, and
the bigger things you do, and the bigger risks that you take, you both deepen your ability to
understand when you’re going a little bit too far.
You know, I didn’t launch in a 100 cities; I launched in 17. But you know, maybe next time
I’d launch in more.
So you build a kind of neural network of saying, “This is my comfort zone. I’m still in it. I
know where my comfort zone is. I know what I’m capable of, and I know what the risks are.”
And so there’s so many things that can come out of the clear blue sky and kill the business,
but you start feeling, “If that happens, what’s the worst thing? If that happened, I’d deal with
that.”
The other thing I’d say is just that there is no one way to succeed. It’s not as if there’s a
magic door and so you’re building a business and if we get through that door…
There’s probably about 17 ways to succeed.
And with First Tuesday I think it was because, although I had a very clear vision of where I
wanted to go, the end result when the business was ultimately sold was actually nowhere near
where I wanted to go.
So it’s like bringing a child into the world and then they decide to become a doctor rather
than a teacher, and you say, “Well, how did that happen because I wanted you to become a
doctor?”
These things have a life of their own and, no matter how focused you are on a strategy, I
think you have to realise that there’s this thing called opportunity that happens, and you have
to go with it.

I could look back at First Tuesday and say, “Well, we should have kept the genie in the
bottle, and we should have worked on what the franchise was and how we built the shakes
and made the hamburgers and did the French fries before we rolled out into 17 cities, and
some of the problems later would not have happened.”
But, you know, if I had done that, I would have missed the moment in time where the magic
was there and so forth.
So we became network-centric rather than product-centric, but you can, with hindsight, look
back and you say “could have, should have, would have,” but it was what it was.
I just think that you don’t know – you don’t know if it’s going to be successful. You make it
happen, and you believe in your own ability to make it happen.
Tip #12 – You can’t market research a market that
doesn’t exist
Simon Woodroffe
You can’t market research a market that doesn’t exist, and in this case, you could have done
some market research on what the sushi market was, but I’d never really thought that the
people who would come to us would be people who already knew sushi.
Yes, there’d be the kind of 10 percent that would say, “Thank God we can get a place in
London where you can get sushi at a decent price.” But the much longer-term thing was to
introduce new people to it.
And you know, I knew that the market was potentially there if you could entice them in by
doing something that was sexy and interesting.
But if we’d gone out and done market research and said, “Would you like to come to a
restaurant where you can eat raw fish off conveyor belts and have the drinks served by
robots?” people would have said, “What are you dreaming about?”
You can’t market research a market that doesn’t exist. But if you’re first into a market that
doesn’t exist, you are the established brand name, etc., etc.
Tip #13 – Risk is essential - but it must be
calculated. Ultimately, only YOU can make a
decision
Mandy Haberman

I see risk – now – as a challenge. And risk is stepping out where the opportunities are.
It has to be – making the decision to take that risk has to be backed up with a lot of
intellectual process because, you know, you’ve got to look at the commercial viability of
taking that risk.
Otherwise, you’d be completely foolhardy.
But, you know, the accountants will say to you, “Don’t take that risk.”
The lawyers and your legal team will sit you down and say, “You don’t want to go to court;
it’s a huge risk and, you know, you’d have to be mad to do it.”
I guess I’m a bit mad. But it depends what you want to be. You know, if you want to be a
winner and really stand out from the crowd, you have to do the dangerous thing.
If you want to be safe and secure, then you do what the accountants tell you and you do what,
you know, the best advice that your legal team gives you.
And you’ll be a bit successful; you’ll be OK. But if you, in your judgement, you think that
the risk is worth taking, you have to go for it.
I mean, in my case, there was also a sense of… I don’t think I could have lived with myself if
we had settled with these infringes and just taken a piddly little royalty.
You know, I had worked for years on this project, and we were on the point of being hugely
successful with it when this infringement occurred. I couldn’t turn the other cheek.
I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t have fought for what I’d created. I mean, you
know, if you’re a mother, you fight for your children, for their survival, and it’s the same sort
of thing.
And yes, right, you listen to the legal team and you have to make a decision that they will tell
you the sort of percentage risk involved. If it had been 40-60 against us, then I wouldn’t have
done it.
But 50 percent and above – either you sink into mediocrity or you win. And I had to do it, I
had to, I wanted to win.
Tip #14 – You must manage the downside of risk
Tom Hunter
Most entrepreneurs, if they’re good, will limit the downside of the risk.
You know, there are very few entrepreneurs who bet their ranch each time. Rupert Murdoch

used to do it; Richard Branson used to do it – but these are exceptions. These are not the rule.
I’ve only bet the ranch once, and I’ll never do it again. So I’m limiting the downside.
People might say, “Oh, that’s a huge risk.” It’s a calculated risk. I know my odds, and I’m
willing to accept those odds. So, I don’t see it as risk. Yes, there is an element of risk, but the
risk-reward ratio is in the right order.
On the Olympus deal, because we knew our business inside out, we knew every ratio, we
knew every lever in that business and what made it successful.
We knew our key ratios; we knew Olympus’s key ratios – and we knew if we only did half as
well in Olympus as we had in Sports Division, we would be OK.
So that’s about knowing your business. On top of that, there was naiveté. We didn’t really
know what it was to take over a company that was seven times our size.
And that’s a good thing – because I’m sure if you knew before you did it, you perhaps
wouldn’t have taken it on.
So there was the understanding of business completely, understanding the acquisition
completely, understanding what you had to do, and a bit of naiveté thrown in to say, “Yes, of
course we can do it.”
I did not, and not to this day, think of that as a risk. My downside was completely covered.
Others saw it as a huge risk. I didn’t. And evidenced by betting everything that I’d earned so
far, laying it all on the line.
Tip # 15 – To be successful you must first feel
uncomfortable
Nigel Risner
My aim is to teach people to be comfortable being uncomfortable. In every area in our lives,
when we wanted to do the big thing it was an uncomfortable experience which we had to
overcome.
So, to use the analogy of your very first driving lesson: 99 percent of people learn in a
manual car. And you look down and there are three pedals; you’ve got two feet.
It’s an uncomfortable experience, but you know if you go through the routine, because
you’ve seen your parents do it and your friends, that if I can just get through that system, it
then becomes comfortable.

And now anyone who drives around in a car, they don’t even know about the feet; they just
do it.
The very first time we had sex, it was an uncomfortable experience, the very first time. We
knew where things were supposed to go; they didn’t always go, but we knew it was about
practising.
We knew it was about talking, communicating, and eventually we’d get there.
The very first time we were in school and someone asked for a volunteer, it’s very
comfortable to sit back, but if you volunteer and they said yes, you’d have to go in front of
the class.
They may ask you a question; up comes that uncomfortability, “I may not know the answer.”
So we have two issues here: There’s the comfortable level that we know, and then there’s the
stretch level of pushing ourselves to the next height.
When we go out of our house and we turn to the left or the right, we kind of know the journey
to the local newsagent.
But if someone said, “I want you to walk to Liverpool,” and you lived in London, well, where
would you start?
So you may not want to go that far because that’s just too far out of your comfort zone. You
might say, “Well, I’ll just walk five miles.”
A marathon runner doesn’t wake up one morning and say, “You know, I can run a 100
metres; I can run a marathon.” That’s too big – so outside their comfort zone.
And it would be not possible and not healthy.
So the question is, What is comfortable? Is the 100 metres? Well, if you only do a 100
metres, after a while that becomes monotonous and boring, and you don’t even get good
exercise.
Could I stretch to 200-300 yards? But I’m coming out of my comfort zone, my body is not
used to it, but I probably could do it. And once you’ve done it once or twice, you realise you
can again move out your comfort zones.
Tip #16 – Get used to hearing the word NO!
Simon Woodroffe
Usually when you ask somebody something and they say no, that is just a stepping stone

along the way.
I remember when we did – not a very good result, as it happens – but I remember thinking
that the Millennium Dome was going to be very successful in the early days and thinking,
“We definitely want to have a restaurant in there.”
And I approached them, and they said, “Absolutely not.” And I thought, “This would be a
great showcase to have a YO! Sushi in there because they have so many visitors around the
world and all that.”
I thought it would make lots of money. In fact, it had gone out to one of the big catering
groups, and they’d taken the whole thing.
And I learnt that simply by persisting – I just never gave up. I just continually sent e-mails
and found the next person and found another contact here…
And in the end they gave up because they thought that they might have missed the Beatles –
you know, one of those type feelings.
Or they thought that they might get bad publicity because here is an entrepreneur who really
wanted to be in it, and they were just giving it out to McDonald’s or whoever it was.
…It’s amazing what you can do through persistence because most people in this world, me
included from time to time, don’t really know.
So if somebody comes at you, it’s like – if you like a girlfriend or a boyfriend, they come and
they shower you with their love – there’s a bit of you that goes, “Maybe they’re right.”
Tip #17 – Language is power. Develop your
language (Part 1)
Glenda Stone
Language is power. Language explains what’s in your mind. Language is a tool to align or
disalign people, things.
One of the things that works very well for me are analogy stories. I try to be as black and
white, as clear as possible about what I’m saying.
Even on a day-to-day level with staff, I leave little room for ambiguity, unless that is
intentional, because with ambiguity you can’t control a situation because you’re dealing with
people’s misunderstandings, unless, of course, that is what you’re intending.
For me, I find that the clearer you are, the more successful you can be in getting what you

want. If you are not sure yourself, that will come through in your language and then people
will not know exactly what it is that you’re after.
But for me, language is power, and you must choose it wisely because – again, it’s like when
you meet someone.
The first seven to eight seconds they’re not listening to you; they’re making up their mind
about you. They’re looking at you. Following that, what words you choose, what you say,
what you don’t say is ever so important.
In fact, one of my classic, practical strategies, for what it’s worth, is silence. Silence is a very,
very effective power strategy.
Often, and again, I must say that we as women fall into that trap of perhaps trying to unify,
bond, comfort, ease people a little too quickly. We fill silence with words, unnecessary
words.
And that doesn’t work so well.
Tip #18 – Language sells. Develop your language
(Part 2)
Debbie Burke
The way I communicate to our staff is how I want them to communicate to the clients and
candidates. And we tend in this business to, or in this company, to use lots of adjectives.
We’ll basically start by, when we’re training people, taking them through the alphabet and
start with A, for example: you know, “absolutely amazing,” “amiable,” – and by using all
those super words all the time, it means that everybody becomes a good communicator.
That starts at the top.
Tip #19 – Become a master communicator
Sir Christopher Evans
I think I’m quite a good communicator in terms of understanding things and talking to people
about things and talking about problems and issues and distilling stuff down.
I think I’m just quite clear, quite blunt, quite forthright, I think, in the way I say things. I
don’t cleverly couch things, hoping they’ll pick up the message. I usually just say what the
message is.
I mean, there are quiet entrepreneurs, aren’t there, but I think you’ve got to be able to talk to

people, to get the most out of people or negotiate and win whatever you want to win.
And I think how you talk, you know, and whether you are charming or funny or witty or
serious or whatever, or intelligent in the way you use your words, whatever, I just think that
the communication is crucial for entrepreneurs.
Tip #20 – Build a balanced team (Part 1)
Lord Harris
What you’ve got to do with management is say to yourself… You’re building a team in a
shop, and say there’s eight people in one of our shops. If you had eight great salesmen, the
shop wouldn’t work.
You need a good manager, who’s either a good salesman or a good administrator. Now his
number two is reverse to that: If he’s a good salesman, you have – the number two has got to
be a good administrator.
If the manager is a good administrator, you need a good salesman as a number two. Two or
three good salesmen that work together as a team and then your warehouse staff.
So it’s a team. I could put our eight best managers in one shop, and they’d be unsuccessful.
It’s building the team with them; it’s about team building.